it's this or nothing, bub

This. This is where an old man runs to the window, throws it open and yells at the clouds, "The floppy disc cameras were awful and I would know, I was there." There were beloved of the light brained CEO type who said things to IT people like "Cables!? Yuck!" They were poorly built, lightly engineered, and software deficient. Leave them be. Let them die. Not all nostalgia is fun. Sometimes, poor lowly techs were crushed by wheels of awful car you now idolize. The Mavica was trash. Praise it not. Bury it. Spit twice and move on.

We built an entire nationwide network of urban news/information websites with the Mavica, one 3.5” floppy at a time. It was the best thing available for the price, and we loved it.

n.b. the network fell apart in the dot.com crash 4 years later, but hell, we had fun.

I loved my Mavica, and I bought mine cheap/used, so probably long after its introduction. And yes, thanks for reminding I should request a FIT test since colonoscopies are so 2010.

My dad loved his floppy disk camera. It was ridiculously large for the day, ate batteries like Cookie Monster in a Keebler factory, and the quality was shit, but it was a point-and-shoot that he could literally point and shoot and most importantly he could eject the floppy and leave copies of photos with anybody who wanted them wherever he was. Floppy disks could be sourced anywhere, even from K-Mart. Portable digital media at the time was still expensive and readers were relatively rare and most consumer-level cameras would write them in proprietary formats that meant you needed to install separate applications just for them.

Also if your last analog camera before buying one of these was an Instamatic, the image quality was probably an upgrade.

So it was more of a mixed bag than anything.

The battery DRM was also the worst. I have the long-zoom floppy Mavica, and it's ... special. I get about 10 minutes from the ¼-century old batteries.

@mare yup, just did the old poop-by-mail test this morning

My friend's mom had one of these back in the late 90's. I was in design school at the time, which included (film) photography classes. We definitely heard plenty at the time about how digital cameras were replacing film. I was excited for that, because I loved taking photos but never really enjoyed the darkroom - but when your only experience was the Mavica, the digital future seemed a long way off. That said, what the Mavica lacked in image quality it mostly made up for in convenience (for some things at least).

By graduation in 2002, I was already on my second digital camera. The little Coolpix I started with (which wasn't all that great) died when it got dropped, replaced by a Sony which was much nicer. Not long after I lucked into a cheap used DSLR (big, weird Kodak DCS-330). I've probably shot less than five rolls of film since college.